It has been awhile since our last post , our team has been struck by work and 2 of them currently continuing on their studies right now . Despite all of work and tons of assignment given by my lectures , i manage to do a review of ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC ,

ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC is the second most high-end card on the AMD R9 series cards and offering 4.7% faster game performance compare to the reference card .

UNBOXING

Standard ASUS retail packaging displaying some sort of beast claw scratch giving the idea of this card is a beast card .

Inside the box you will find another black box that have a golden ASUS logo and its tag line .

Inside the black box you will find the card itself and of course before that there is an accessories box which is i skip because nothing fancy in there .

Take a closer look on the left side fan , its a CoolTech fan consists of a hybrid blade and bearing design, with inner radial blower and outer flower-type blades. These provide multi-directional airflow to accelerate heat removal and enable highly stable graphics performance .

Yeah on the right side its just a normal fan .

ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II come with a black metal backplate so the card wont bend in time

TEST RIG

BENCHMARK RESULT

All the games benchmark options are at their highest settings

TEMPERATURE

Well looking at the temperature you can see the load is quite high , my room ambient temp is around 32’c . to be honest after more than 2 hour of non stop gaming i can feel my room temperature increase , and i did try to touch the heatpipe on ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II just 1 sec your finger touch the pipes it will burn your whole hand , just kidding 🙂 , i cannot hold my finger on the heatpipes more than 1 sec .

CONCLUSION

ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II perform well in gaming and can handle most of current games smoothly but my test only cover up for 1080p . About Mantle for now not many benchmark tools and games support mantle , for BF4 i cant monitor the FPS because of FRAPS did not support Mantle yet , so the only Mantle benchmark i was able to do is Alien Swarm from Steam , as you can see in the Benchmark section Alien Swarm on Mantle achieve higher average FPS compare to DX11 and the test more stable on Mantle .

Temperature is also important , you do not want your CPU or GPU temperature going up over 90’c and making your room feel hot , a hot system may decrease your rigs life expectancy , so you might want to consider water cooled this card if you live in a warmer country like Malaysia .